Have any "skeptics" who complain about peer review ever participated in the process?

Well, I believe in AGW but consider myself to be a very skeptical person, so I'll answer the question.

I have one paper in peer review right now, and another one that made it through last month (Journal of Climate). Those people that offer the opinion that it's just a good old boy network where I'll pass your paper if you pass mine, clearly have no experience at all with the process. If you look at the rejection rates for papers in atmospheric science journals, the mode is in the 30-40% rejection level. Clearly if we're all just supposed to be passing each others' papers on, we're not doing a very good job of it or the rejection rates would not be so high.

The peer review process is highly variable, some reviewers may spend lots of time poring over every word in the manuscript, while others glance it over (or have one of their grad students look it over), tell the authors to fix a couple of minor things then let it go. Typically you will have 2-3 reviewers plus the editor. If the editor doesn't like it you're in big trouble and it's probably best to resubmit to a different journal. Anyway it may not be at all easy to change the manuscript to suit the reviewers, and it will almost always take some effort to revise and resubmit.

You do get to suggest reviewers, but the editor does not have to necessarily use those reviewers. If you're like me, you may not be able to come up with enough names to suggest and you're certain to get people that you don't know reviewing. On the current paper one of the reviewers is someone that I know (he chose to reveal his identity), and he is the person in the world most likely to give me a hard time, since I know he doesn't like my method of analysis. Nevertheless, if my paper makes it through (I'm thinking it will), I believe it will be generally better because of his review.

Peer review is far from a perfect process, and it is certainly not meant to catch every error there might be in a paper, but it is far better than having no review at all.

It certainly is more than a "rubber-stamp" on papers.

i won't talk from journey because i'm nonetheless in uncomplicated terms a intense schooler, yet i will talk from what i've got found out from somewhat analyze: interior the final style, David is desirable in that peer-assessment can take many varieties. in lots of fields that's the submission of a paper via an editor to regularly 2 or 3 different people who're experts that comprehend the artwork. maximum in many situations, certainly, those 'referees' are autonomous from one yet another and don't talk their recommendations with one yet another. notwithstanding, it is diverse for various different journals that have greater stringent standards. For "Nature" and "technology," that are very vast of their classes' concentration, a 2-step assessment technique is used. right it is the place an editorial board is used - if the board does not locate that the artwork is a leap forward interior the sphere (adequate to placed up interior the mag, in any case), it will be rejected. If the paper passes, then that's despatched out to referees for scrutiny. in this sense, the editorial board is peer-assessment and yet isn't on an identical time. The board does not examine for errors simply by fact the call of referees might, yet somewhat focuses greater on the outcomes of the artwork. those journals receive a brilliant array of (and a lot of) submissions and could clear out the terrific out. The assessment of the artwork remains in many situations as much as autonomous referees. to no remember if or no longer Einstein's papers have been peer-reviewed, i'm not sure if i will remark on that. If Einstein's papers have been study and revised via Planck and Wein, then they have been peer-reviewed. notwithstanding, that's not inevitably that straightforward. it would look that Annalen der Physik very strictly peer-comments eery paper earlier that's seen for e book, and a trifling assessment via 2 human beings does not look to greater healthful into this usual. it would help if I had get entry to to the Wiley InterScience internet site so i will do somewhat greater analyze on the mag's peer-assessment technique, notwithstanding that's inconveniently down suited now. If the standards for peer assessment have been much less one hundred and five years in the past, and if Planck and Wien certainly made techniques for revisions and did no longer purely study the papers, then that's pronounced the papers have been peer reviewed. i'm not sure nevertheless what constituted desirable peer assessment in 1905 for Annalen. i desire greater archives.

Yes. On average I review about 1 technical report per week. I have also reviewed a large number of technical papers and abstracts prior to submission to various industry association and technical sessions. I have on a few occasions reviewed papers submitted to me by ASME and SAE, prior to their presentation and publication. At the same time nearly all of my technical reports and papers are reviewed at numerous levels. Incidentally, just reviewed a coworkers technical article, that proposas and explain a paticular industry wide infintile failure mode of a critical utility grade wind turbine.

What's your point?

There was a time when I thought people like Mike were in fact sceptics but I now know for a fact that this site is only for contrarians,people that without evidence or common sense have their stage.Shame on all of them.

It seems whenever climate skeptics try to publish something, if accepted the paper ends up being found to contain errors so egregious that nobody can figure out how the manuscript was ever accepted in the first place. More often however, the paper does not pass peer review since the paper was found to contain errors so egregious even with revision it would not be publishable, leading to blog posts from the skeptic author about how unfair the peer-review process (with the result that the hogwash then appears in Energy & Environmental). So it is not surprising that the skeptics here know nothing about peer review, they have learned about if from a very distorted perspective. It would be like asking a career criminal to describe in an objective manner the workings of the criminal justice system. Their view is all one-sided and from an adversarial perspective.

Based on what I know of the peer-review in science, the skeptics here know nothing about it, and regularly display ignorance of the details of the process and how those details are both its strengths and weaknesses.

It seems to me that the thrust of this question is that if you don't have direct participatory experience, your opinion doesn't count. Now that's a load of crap.

Regardless, as you asked I do have experience in the peer review process both as an author and reviewer. And I can tell you that any document which is officially published needs to be very carefully vetted because it is being counted on as expert advice.

And based on experience, I can also add that from time to time some very important comments come from experts where the document they are reviewing is not their field of expertise. And it is for this reason that I am pushing for an interactive open review process of draft publications to reach a wider audience.

For anybody who wishes to learn more about peer review and specifically the current debate to make it more open, there are lots of articles here: http://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/debate/

Could you let us know what you put down on your IPCC review application form? Like which chapters you are interested in, your publications and your area of expertise?

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Edit: "Mike - scientific peer review requires experts to review..."

I've never said otherwise. For example, take an expert in statistics who while having probably no knowledge of tree rings or proxies or climate science in general, could still give very valuable input to something like a times series reconstruction. And I use this example specifically because I think it has been this need in climate science which has a lot of difficult statistical analysis required.

See, there you go, I'm a climate skeptic who commented on peer review. If you don't like my opinion can you go through the papers in the link I provided above and see the robust discussion about this topic.

You might also find this interesting: http://www.atmospheric-chemistry-and-physics.net/p...

Are you saying that people like Lindzen, Spencer, Mckitrick never participated in the peer review process?

My reports are always reviewed by my peers, but mostly to catch typos. Hopefully I don't make too many other types of errors but it is always easy to miss a data point here and there. My reports don't undergo as much review as those I am sure you are referring to, thankfully, because I am always finding mistakes even after review but I digress.

McIntyre showed that peer review in the Climate Science community isn't much to brag about. They didn't even check the data or run them through the formulas. They didn't inquire why certain data sets were chosen. They didn't even check the formulas. It seems the results were peachy keen and that seemed to be enough.

I think most of the "skeptics" to which you euphemistically refer (e.g. cultish anti-science liars and dupes thereof) have "participated in the process" of re-shoveling copious magnitudes of denier-blogger BS, which is being endlessly sprayed and recycled and sprayed again in any and all cyber directions, in hopes that something might stick. Of course, this is all for a good cause; to save the world from the great hoax conspiracy of Svante Arrhenius, i.e. Pigbearman Gore and his amazing Reptilian Hollow Moon Time Machine, funded by the eco-Nazi Rothschild tree-huggers, and aiming at Stalinist tyranny through higher taxes on gasoline. Today the SUVs, tomorrow the world, and meanwhile let's terrorize JimZ, Ottawa and Maxx from under their beds.

"Peer-review" -like every other laughably misunderstood and stupidly perverted "technical term" of the anti-science sprayers, shovelers and recyclers, sometimes appearing to be closely related to those who call themselves the Knights who say "We are Skeptics"- is of course whatever WattsUp copy-pasted of what Koch propagandists spun of what Limbaugh thought he remember of what Inhofe half-understood of what Crichton pulled out of his bottomless backside orifice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIV4poUZAQo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory

http://www.onethirdoftheholocaust.com/

http://www.alaska.net/~clund/e_djublonskopf/Flatea...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QBv2CFTSWU

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005...

You might get a more sensible answer than this from some actual "Skeptics" i.e. Anti-science-clown-Fake-Skeptics, but I'd be skeptical about that. You'd probably have better luck appeasing them with Another Shrubbery.

Anyone who holds their opinions out for their peers and general public to see is involved in the "peer review" process.

The process that AGW uses is a "peer review" process that removes disagreeable peers.... so flossie is right in the first sentence...

Edit...

"Signing up" and being accepted are VERY different things. Try an experiment: offer your opinion as a peer reviewer in a way that any published scientist who has disagreed with global warming has. See if they keep asking you for your review. I'd lay a money bet on the results.